love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs
by Glistening Cerulean Eyes
Summary: THE STICK was happy being a stick. Unlike many other entities it was totally satisfied with everything about itself and everything that it was. If Shallan had tried to turn any other stick into fire, she would have met with success, but this particular stick enjoyed its peculiar life and everything about its existence. Except for one thing. The stick was alone.


_THE STICK was happy being a stick. Unlike many other entities it was totally satisfied with everything about itself and everything that it was. If Shallan had tried to turn any other stick into fire, she would have met with success, but this particular stick enjoyed its peculiar life and everything about its existence._

_Except for one thing. The stick was alone._

After Shallan abandoned it upon the pile of other sticks (who wouldn't really have minded becoming fire, honestly), the stick sat and waited in satisfied smugness and immense self confidence. As the days wore on, though, the stick became aware of one niggling thought. It recalled Shallan and the Cryptic working in tandem, playing some kind of strange good cop, bad cop routine in an attempt to convince it into a flammable state. The stick had nobody to work with. Although it was certainly a stick, it was beginning to feel that it was a lonely stick. It craved some kind of friend… some kind of lover. Some entity to bring something new into its life. Maybe it was foolish to hope for more. It was a stick, obviously, and easily the best ever stick at that- but… the stick didn't sigh, because it was a stick. But had it possessed a functioning set of lungs, ribs and a trachea, it would have sighed the deepest, loneliest sigh in the Cosmere.

It took weeks for the stick to realise its dream. A tall, morally questionable man dressed in black was walking along the beach, scanning the wreckage and leftovers from the shipwreck. Spotting the anomaly of an unlit campfire in the distance the storyteller strode purposely up to it. He crouched and, by pure chance, chose that one particularly self-satisfied stick to pick up in his slender and calloused hands. The stick was used to scratch that one bit between his shoulder blades that the man currently calling himself Hoid couldn't quite reach. That could have been the end of it; the stick discarded back onto the pile and left there until a storm swept it and its comrades in sticktitude up and into the sea. But the man who was currently calling himself Hoid continued holding the stick, absentmindedly carrying it down the beach as he went about his inspection. The stick was fascinated by its inscrutable new porter. He was certainly less talkative than the other one had been, and that was good. The stick hadn't liked her pressuring it all the time. It was carried by this potential new paramour all the way along the beach, which the stick was certain was a romantic gesture on the tall man's behalf. That was good and proper, of course- it knew was a fine specimen of a stick- but it couldn't help but feel that the whole 'walking' thing could be a problem in the long run. The stick had no real interest in animate entities. Breathing, blinking, digesting, walking, doing that thing where they suddenly stopped being animate; it all seemed so unnecessary to the stick. The stick was inanimate, so surely it should be searching for a sweetheart who wouldn't be so much trouble. How to communicate this to the tall man in black, though, was completely beyond it, because it was a stick. It supposed it could allow him to keep walking along the beach with it, though. It wasn't unenjoyable, even if he was occasionally tapping the stick against his hand as he thought. He was probably thinking about how to follow up the romantic walk. The stick had no interest in candlelit dinners, but it supposed it could put up with one if it meant the man- whose strong, silent act was beginning to get annoying- would actually talk to it for a while. It wouldn't respond, but it would be nice if he was intending to make the relationship work.

Hoid had other plans, however. The stick had no eyes, but after a while it realised that its new boyfriend had taken it to a different place, a place that wasn't the beach. Not even the same planet, it suspected. There was a different feel to the Shadesmar here- more friendly, perhaps more harmonious. The stick didn't really mind it here. It considered that it could probably make a permanent move, if its romantic interest needed it to. There would be no competition between it and the other, lower-class sticks here. It allowed the tall man wearing black to carry it about the city as he talked to people and did things that the stick didn't pay much attention to. The man had- again, absentmindedly- tucked the stick into his back pocket, which was pleasingly intimate. Despite this new stage in their romance, the stick was beginning to think that this relationship wasn't going to work out. The tall man was nice, and very kind to walk along the beach with it and to take it to another planet for a fun day-trip, but he was very troublesomely animate. There were clearly complex computations going on in that lump of flesh that animated entities carried about in their skull cavities. Occasionally he stopped by a place to put substances in his face for energy, and that made the stick quite uncomfortable. The whole 'digestion' concept was a bit of a worry, and besides, it suspected that the tall man in black had been maybe a little too friendly to his coffee cup. It was definitely time to move on.

The tall man stopped outside a small building and, patting himself down, discovered the stick in his back pocket. The stick realised that it was time to break the news to him, though it wasn't quite sure how to go about that when the man seemed to prefer to communicate through moving air through his body and slapping meat things together. It dithered indecisively about the best way to tell him that it just… wasn't working out. The man seemed to know, though. Perhaps it was only the stick's fancy that the man's hand lingered on it for a moment before he dropped it by the door of the building. The stick was glad that he had taken it so well. Now it just had to wait until the right kind of entity came along. It wasn't going to accept another animated creature. The tall man in black had been an illuminating experience. It was nice to be carried around, and the stick thought the candle lit dinner would have been enjoyable if they had gotten around to it, but… the whole 'digestion' thing. No, it was strictly inanimate entities from here on, the stick determined. There were a few rocks by the door, but they weren't very interesting. The building was not fit for a stick of its quality, either. It sat by the door, patiently waiting for The One to come along, blessing the animate passersbys with its hypnotic skill at being a stick.

Finally, one day, the stick was picked up by another animate. It was not delighted by this turn of events, and it tried to radiate its displeasure as much as was feasible. The animate person holding it used it to hit another animated being on the chest.

"You just don't understand _fashion,_ Wax," the man was saying. He was shorter than the other one, and he was wearing the most beautiful hat that the stick had ever encountered. "For example," he said, "your hat isn't a patch on mine." The stick agreed. The other man wore some kind of spiritless bowler. It wasn't like the gorgeous hat that its current porter wore. If only the stick could get closer to it… maybe make some kind of overture. It had to make its intentions known.

"Your hat has been shot," the other man said. "In fact, is there still-" he leaned over. "Rust and Ruin, there's still blood on that, Wayne! That's unhygenic." The stick thought there was nothing wrong with the bullet hole. It added something.

"Is not," Wayne said. "Besides, I think it adds something."

"It adds the urge to shoot it again," Wax said.

"Oh, fine," Wayne said. He took the hat off. The stick was instantly captivated as the man brought the hat down to it. "Here, I'll add this lucky stick to my lucky hat." The stick found itself entwined in the leather band that wrapped around the hat. It was so intimate, and so soon! But the hat was so lovely, the stick was willing to embrace this new development. The hat was placed back on the animate entity's head, leaving the stick and the hat to get to know each other.

"A stick can't be lucky," Wax said with the great patience of somebody who had discussed this sort of thing before.

"Of course it's lucky, mate," Wayne said, patting the side of his hat proprietorially. "Nobody's used it to build a fire."


End file.
